For some time now, Snowflake and the larger cloud data warehouse (CDW) industry has made waves in the business world, transforming the way businesses operate, connect with customers, and measure success. And yet, even as more organizations bring on CDWs, marketers continue to be left out of the conversation.
This is due to the fact that most marketing technologies—including traditional customer data platforms (CDPs)—are not built on cloud data warehouses, nor are they designed to work with them. As a result, marketing teams and the organizations they serve are faced with an unwinnable situation: if they’re using a CDW, accessing that data for marketing requires purchasing a tool that serves data teams only—like reverse ETL (rETL) tools or “composable” CDPs—or, purchasing tools that serve marketers only, such as customer experience platforms or marketing clouds. This leaves sensitive customer data in a duplicative, fractured, unsafe, and unusable (for the rest of the organization) state.
Today we say “no more!” to that forced dichotomy and offer a better way.
Simon Data is excited to announce that we now offer the first fully Snowflake-connected CDP through our new connected segmentation feature—built to serve the needs of data teams, while enabling non-technical marketers to build customer segments directly within Snowflake, without writing a single line of SQL.
Say goodbye to ad hoc marketing requests
Traditionally, B2C marketers have built customer segments in two ways: by hacking together the fragmented data that lives within their own marketing systems, or they turn to engineering teams to source data directly from their CDW. In either situation, marketers require significant data engineering support to source, extract, transform, scope and size these audiences, as well as actually build the lists for use in downstream marketing channels.
The subsequent back and forth wrangling can cause delays and some very real headaches on both ends. Data engineers often report feeling like glorified order takers—endlessly writing and rewriting ad hoc SQL queries to support marketing needs. Marketing continues to be limited by the fact that most of its data is decentralized outside of the rest of the business’ data architecture, which not only prevents them from achieving their personalization goals, but also introduces some serious security and compliance issues.
And thus the divide between marketing and data teams continues to grow.
Enter Simon Data: The CDP for B2C businesses running on Snowflake
Accomplishing a fully-connected deployment of our CDP was no mean feat and required us to take our no-code segmentation tool—something that’s already known and loved by marketers across hundreds of B2C brands—and rebuild it directly in Snowflake.
Many data leaders already see the benefits of providing their marketing teams with data at their disposal. Those benefits are both self-serving and altruistic: doing so frees up the engineering team to focus on other priorities, and marketers enjoy access to the data they need to launch the hyper-personalized campaigns of their dreams.
The additional value of a fully-connected deployment is that sensitive customer data never leaves Snowflake until it’s ready to be used in downstream marketing tools. This means Simon now offers consistent and cutting-edge security architecture, broadly available business logic, no risk of data fragmentation, flexible data syncing latency, and most of all, simplicity.
In short: we’re giving marketers the keys, but data leaders are still the ones who determine how far they can drive.
The fastest and easiest CDP deployment–ever.
Deploying Simon takes mere hours and can be accomplished in just a few simple steps.
- Share your Snowflake schemas with Simon – Grant Simon access to one customer identity table with a unique customer identifier, plus any other customer property tables (one to one with customer) or event tables (many to one with customer) that can be combined with the customer identity table.
- Match relevant customer tables – Use Simon’s Schema Builder to associate the relevant customer tables. Your attributes from the provided tables will immediately surface within the segment builder.
- Build your customer segments – Using the customer attributes, build your customer segments using Simon’s easy and intuitive no-code user interface. Your data will remain in Snowflake until you activate it in a marketing end channel, such as your email service provider or SMS tool.
Connected Segmentation solves a problem that reverse ETL can’t
Reverse ETL tools don’t measure up for two reasons – first they really only shuffle data around between tools and systems. Second, they are built for data engineers, not marketers. This means members of your team continue to be tied up servicing marketing requests when they could be tackling more pressing data challenges.
At its core, we built Connected Segmentation as part of our bigger mission to drive a healthier and more dynamic relationship between data and marketing teams – one that’s truly symbiotic rather than codependent. Not only are marketers now able to size and build their segments on their own, the output adds even more value to the data ecosystem – as segments are built and put to use, the resulting engagement data flows directly back into Snowflake for further use and iteration.
Ready to get started?
If you’re interested in learning more about Connected Segmentation and our broader fully Snowflake-connected CDP, request a demo today.
Attending Snowflake Summit? Our team will be on-site at Snowflake Summit offering a limited number of free 60-day trials. If you’d like to learn more stop by our booth #1952-D and speak with a member of our team.
